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Sunday, 13 August 2017

Benjamin Netanyahu Proposes to ‘Swap’ Israel’s Arab citizens in exchange for the West Bank Settlements

The
Expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians is a Consensus Policy of Likud and Israeli
Labour

Making
its way through the Knesset is the Jewish State Bill, which removes the status
of Arabic as an official language. The
Jewish State Bill also defines Israel as a state of the Jewish people. By Jewish people is meant not just Jews who
live in Israel but all Jews, including Jews in the diaspora.

Israel
is quite unique in that it doesn’t have a single nationality covering all its
citizens or residents. In most countries
citizenship and nationality are interchangeable, even when people define
themselves as members of different nations.
One’s legal nationality is often different from the nation someone
belongs to as in the case of multi-national states.

For
example all British citizens are also British nationals even though the latter
may consider themselves English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Citizenship usually defines one’s political
rights and sits on top of a shared nationality.

There
is no Israeli nationality. There is a
Jewish nationality, a Muslim, Christian and many other nationalities but in a
Jewish state only one nationality counts.
Israel’s Arab citizens are considered by most Jews to be there on
sufferance. They are viewed as a fifth column. When e.g. there were wild fires in Israel over the summer, as has occurred in many countries, Israel's Arab citizens were immediately blamed by Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan and Netanyahu. When the fires had died down those Israeli Arabs who had been arrested were released but the memories of the 'fire intifada' remained. Arabs in Israel are the scapegoat for all perceived ills in Israel much as Jews used to be the scapegoat in European countries. [see Two months on, still no evidence of a 'fire intifada' in Israel] Israel's Arabs are the enemy
within. A plurality of Israeli Jews have consistently
supported the physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. See e.g. Nearly
half of Israeli Jews believe in ethnic cleansing, survey finds.

That
is the meaning of a Jewish state. It
isn’t a state in the same sense that Britain is a Christian state. In Britain, the fact that I am Jewish has no
bearing on my rights and responsibilities. There is no Christian National Fund
that tells me that as a Jew I cannot reside or live in a certain area. In Israel there is a Jewish National Fund,
which controls or owns 93% of Israeli land.
Non-Jews cannot live on such land which is why there is such
overcrowding in the Arab sector. When
the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli Land Authority and JNF could
not refuse to lease or sell land to an Arab the Knesset passed a Reception Committee
Bill which allowed all-Jewish communities to reject Arab applications to join
those communities. In South Africa that
was called Apartheid.

The
Israeli Right led by Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beitenu, Israel’s fascist
Defence Minister, has long advocated as part of a 2 state solution that
Israel’s Palestinian citizens should be transferred into a Palestinian state
(for which read Bantustan).
This is another reason why a 2 State solution is an Apartheid
solution. A 2 state solution would be an
open invitation to Israel to expel Israel’s Arabs. Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish
state rests on how high the percentage of Jews in Israel is. The higher the percentage of Jews the more
secure and safe the Jewish state is.

Tzipi Livni, co-leader of the Zionist Union with the Israeli Labour Party, supports the transfer of Israel's Arab citizens

As
the tide of corruption accusations begin to threaten Netanyahu’s ability to
hold onto power, it is no surprise that he now supports the idea of a physical
expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians. No
one should be under any illusions though that this is simply a product of
Israel’s far-Right government. Under the
previous Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, negotiations conducted by the then Foreign
Minister, Tsipi Livni, aimed at transferring Israel’s Palestinians into a Palestinian
state. Livni is now a co-leader of the Zionist
Union, the electoral grouping that includes the Israeli Labour Party. Israeli Labour is an ardent supporter of
segregation between Jew and Arab, i.e. an Apartheid policy.

This
is why Israel as a Jewish state is an inherently racist state. It is not Jewish culturally or even
religiously. The defines its Jewishness
based on a racial definition of who is Jewish.

Israel’s crackdown on access to the al-Aqsa mosque compound after two
Israeli policemen were killed there last month provoked an eruption of fury
among Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and rocked Israel’s relations with the
Arab world.

Netanyahu and Lieberman agree on the ethnic cleansing of Israel's Arabs

Three weeks on, the metal detectors and security cameras have gone and –
for now, at least – Jerusalem is calmer.

But the shockwaves are still reverberating, and being felt most keenly
far away in northern Israel, in the town of Umm al-Fahm. The three young men
who carried out the shootings were from the town’s large Jabareen clan. They
were killed on the spot by police.

Umm al-Fahm, one of the largest communities for Israel’s 1.7 million
Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, had already gained a
reputation among the Jewish majority for political and religious extremism and
anti-Israel sentiment.

In large part, that reflected its status as home to the northern
branch of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah. In late 2015, Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlawed the Movement as a terror organisation, despite his
intelligence agencies failing to find evidence to support such a conclusion.

More likely, Netanyahu’s antipathy towards Salah’s group, and Umm
al-Fahm, derives from its trenchant efforts to ensure the strongest possible
presence of Muslims at al-Aqsa.

As Israel imposed ever tighter restrictions on Palestinians from the
occupied territories reaching the mosque, Salah organised regular coaches to
bring residents to the compound from Umm al-Fahm and surrounding communities.

Umm el-Fahm - Israel's largest Arab city

Thousands attend funeral

Nonetheless, the three youths’ attack at al-Aqsa last month has served
to bolster suspicions that Umm al-Fahm is a hotbed of radicalism and potential
terrorism.

That impression was reinforced last week when the Israeli authorities,
at judicial insistence, belatedly handed over the three bodies for burial.

Although Israel wanted the funerals as low-key as possible, thousands
attended the burials. Moshe Arens, a former minister from Netanyahu’s Likud
party, expressed a common sentiment this week: “The gunmen evidently had the support of many
in Umm al-Fahm, and others seem prepared to follow in their footsteps.”

Yousef Jabareen, a member of the Israeli parliament who is himself from
Umm al-Fahm, said such accusations were unfair.

“People in
the town were angry that the bodies had been kept from burial in violation of
Muslim custom for two weeks,” he told Middle East Eye. “There are just a few extended families here, so many people wanted to
show solidarity with their relatives, even though they reject the use of
violence in our struggle for our civil rights.”

Nonetheless, the backlash from Netanyahu was not long in coming.

In a leak to Israeli TV, his office said he had proposed to
the Trump administration ridding Israel of a region known as the Little
Triangle, which includes some 300,000 Palestinians citizens. Umm al-Fahm is its
main city.

The Triangle is a thin sliver of Israeli territory, densely packed with
Palestinian citizens, bordering the north-west corner of the West Bank.

As part of a future peace deal, Netanyahu reportedly told the Americans
during a meeting in late June, Umm al-Fahm and its neighbouring communities
would be transferred to a future Palestinian state.

‘A double crime’

In effect, Netanyahu was making public his adoption of the long-standing
and highly controversial plan of his far-right defence minister, Avigdor
Lieberman.

This would see borders redrawn to allow Israel to annex coveted
settlements in the West Bank in exchange for stripping hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship and reassigning their communities to
a highly circumscribed Palestinian state.

Jamal Zahalka, another member of the parliament, from Kafr Kara in the
Triangle, said Netanyahu was supporting a double crime.

“He wins
twice over,” he told Middle East Eye. “He gets
to annex the illegal settlements to Israel, while he also gets rid of Arab
citizens he believes are a threat to his demographic majority.”

Lieberman lost no time in congratulating Netanyahu for adopting his
idea, tweeting: “Mr Prime Minister, welcome to the club.”

With his leak, Netanyahu has given official backing to an aspiration
that appears to be secretly harboured by many Israeli politicians – and one
that, behind the scenes, they have been pushing increasingly hard with
Washington and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

A poll last year showed that nearly half of Israeli Jews want Palestinians
expelled from Israel.

With Netanyahu now publicly on board, it looks suspiciously like
Lieberman’s role over many years has been to bring into the mainstream a policy
the liberal Haaretz newspaper has compared to
“ethnic cleansing”.

Marzuq al-Halabi, a Palestinian-Israeli analyst and researcher at the
Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, believed the move was designed with two aims
in mind.

It left a “constant threat” of
expulsion hanging over the heads of the minority as a way to crush political
activity and demands for reform, he wrote on the Hebrew website Local Call. And
at the same time it cast Palestinian citizens out into a “territorial and governmental emptiness”.

Inevitably, the plan revives fears among Palestinian citizens of the
Nakba, the Arabic word for “Catastrophe”: the mass expulsions that occurred
during the 1948 war to create Israel on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland.

Jabareen observed that the population swap implied that Palestinian
citizens “are part of the enemy. … It
says we don’t belong in our homeland, that our future is elsewhere.”

Backing from Kissinger

The idea of a populated land exchange was first formalised by Lieberman
in 2004, when he unveiled what he grandly called a “Separation of the
Nations” programme. It quickly won supporters in the US, including from elder
statesman Henry Kissinger.

The idea of a land and population swap – sometimes termed “static
transfer” – was alluded to by former prime ministers, including Ehud Barak
and Ariel Sharon, at around the same time.

But only Lieberman set out a clear plan. He suggested stripping as many
as 300,000 Palestinians in the Triangle of their Israeli citizenship. Other
Palestinian citizens would be expected to make a “loyalty oath” to Israel as a
“Jewish Zionist state”, or face expulsion to a Palestinian state. The aim was
to achieve two states that were as “ethnically pure” as possible.

Jabareen noted that Lieberman’s populated land exchange falsely equated
the status and fate of Palestinians who are legal citizens of Israel with
Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law.

Lieberman exposed his plan to a bigger audience in 2010, when he
addressed the United Nations as foreign minister in the first of Netanyahu’s series
of recent governments. Notably, at that time, the prime minister’s advisers
distanced him from the proposal.

Mass arrests

A month after Lieberman’s speech, it emerged that Israeli security
services had carried out secret exercises based on his scenario. They practised
quelling civil disturbances with mass arrests following a
peace deal that required redrawing the borders to expel large numbers of
Palestinian citizens.

Behind the scenes, other Israeli officials are known to have supported
more limited populated land swaps.

Documents leaked in 2011 revealed that three years earlier the centrist
government of Ehud Olmert had advanced just such a population exchange during
peace talks.

Tzipi Livni, then the foreign minister, had proposed moving the border so that several villages in
Israel would end up in a future Palestinian state. Notably, however, Umm
al-Fahm and other large communities nearby were not mentioned.

The political sympathies between Lieberman and Livni, the latter widely
seen as a peacemaker by the international community, were nonetheless evident.

In late 2007, as Israel prepared for the Annapolis peace conference,
Livni described a future Palestinian state as “the answer” for Israel’s
Palestinian citizens. She said it was illegitimate for them to seek political
reforms aimed at ending Israel’s status as a “home unto the Jewish people”.

Demographic reduction

The first hints that Netanyahu might have adopted Lieberman’s plan came
in early 2014 when the Maariv newspaper reported that a population exchange
that included the Triangle had been proposed in talks with the US
administration, then headed by Barack Obama.

The hope, according to the paper, was that the transfer would reduce the proportion of Palestinian citizens from a fifth
of the population to 12 per cent, shoring up the state’s Jewishness.

Now Netanyahu has effectively confirmed that large-scale populated land
swaps may become a new condition for any future peace agreement with the
Palestinians, observed Jabareen.

At Lieberman’s request in 2014, the Israeli foreign ministry produced a
document outlining ways a land and population exchange could be portrayed as in
accordance with international law. Most experts regarded
the document’s arguments as specious.

The foreign ministry concluded
that the only hope of justifying the measure would be to show either that the
affected citizens supported the move, or that it had the backing of the
Palestinian Authority, currently headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Anything short of this would be a non-starter because it would either
qualify as “forced transfer” of the Triangle’s inhabitants, a war crime, or
render them stateless.

The problem for Israel is that opinion polls have repeatedly shown that no
more than a quarter of Palestinians in the Triangle area back being moved
into a Palestinian state. Getting their approval is likely to prove formidably
difficult.

Zahalka rejected claims by Israeli politicians that this was a vote of
confidence from Palestinian citizens in Israeli democracy.

“Israel has
made the West Bank a living hell for Palestinians, and few [in Israel] would
choose to inflict such suffering on their own families. But it also because we
do not want to be severed from the rest of the Palestinian community in Israel
– from our personal, social and economic life.”

Jabareen agreed. “We are also
connected to places like Nazareth, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Lid and Ramle.”

And he noted that Netanyahu and Lieberman were talking about redrawing
the borders to put only their homes inside a future Palestinian state. “Umm al-Fahm had six times as much land
before Israel confiscated it. We still consider those lands as ours, but they
are not included in the plan.”

Recognise Jewish state

It is in this context – one where Palestinians citizens will not consent
to their communities being moved outside Israel’s borders – that parallel
political moves by Netanyahu should be understood, said Jabareen.

Not least, it helps to explain why Netanyahu has made recognition of
Israel as a Jewish state by Abbas’ Palestinian Authority a precondition for
talks.

Aware of the trap being laid for it, the PA has so far refused to offer
such recognition. But if it can be arm-twisted into agreement, Netanyahu will
be in a much stronger position. He can then impose draconian measures on
Palestinians in Israel, including loyalty oaths and an end to their demands for
political reform – under threat that, if they refuse, they will be moved to a
Palestinian state.

At the same time, Netanyahu has been pushing ahead with a new basic law
that would define Israel as the nation
state of the Jewish people, rather than of Israel’s entire population. The
legislation’s intent is to further weaken the Palestinian minority’s claim on
citizenship.

Netanyahu’s decision to ban the Islamic Movement as a terror
organisation fits into the picture too.

In a 2012 report by the International Crisis Group, a Washington and
Brussels-based conflict resolution group, an official in Lieberman’s party explained that one of the covert goals of Lieberman’s plan
was to rid Israel of “the heartland of
the Islamic Movement”.

Conversely, Netanyahu’s Likud allies and coalition partners have been
pushing aggressively to annex settlements in the West Bank.

Zahalka noted that the prime minister gave his backing last week to
legislation that would expand
Jerusalem’s municipal borders to incorporate a number of large settlements
– a move that would amount to annexation in all but name.

“The deal is Israel takes
Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and gives Umm al-Fahm and its surroundings
to the PA,” he said.

The pieces seem to be slowly falling into place for a populated land
exchange that would strip hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their
Israeli citizenship.

Paradoxically, however, the ultimate obstacle may prove to be Netanyahu
himself – and his reluctance to concede any kind of meaningful state to the
Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism

PM raises
idea of land swap in talks with senior Trump adviser Kushner and envoy
Greenblatt, sources say. White House officials: One of many ideas discussed

Barak Ravid
and Jack Khoury Jul 27, 2017 10:36 PM

Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested to American officials that
Israeli-Arab communities could be moved under Palestinian control as part of a
final status agreement, Israeli officials said on Thursday. In exchange, Israel
would annex some West Bank settlements.

Netanyahu's
idea for land swaps in the Wadi Ara region in return for Israeli settlements
was reported for the first time on Thursday on Channel 2 News.

The
officials, who requested anonymity, said Netanyahu raised the idea in the talks
with U.S. President Donald Trump's senior advisor Jared Kushner and American
envoy Jason Greenblatt, during their visit in Israel a few weeks ago.

"The issue didn't come up as a separate
proposal, but as part of a proposal for a comprehensive arrangement with the
Palestinians," one official said.

Senior White
House officials said the issue was broached in the talks, but not in a serious
or significant way. "This may have
been one of many ideas discussed several weeks ago in the context of a peace
agreement and not in the context of a separate annexation," an
official said.

The report
came a day after a mass funeral in Umm al-Fahm, an Arab city in Israel's Wadi
Ara, of the three assailants who carried out the attack at the Temple Mount, in
which two policemen were killed.

Calls for
carrying out further attacks heard during the funeral evoked more criticism in
the right wing against Netanyahu's decision to remove the contested metal
detectors from the entrances to the Temple Mount. Israel had installed the
security measure at the holy site following the attack.

The report
also comes amid a wave of announcements and statements from the Prime
Minister's Office in the last few days in a bid to appease rightist public
opinion. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been advocating for
several years to hand over Wadi Ara to the Palestinians in a future peace
agreement, tweeted on Thursday night: "Mr.
prime minister, welcome to the club."

MK Aida
Touma-Suliman responded on Thursday to the report about Netanyahu's proposal.
"The cat is out of the bag and
Netanyahu has shown his true colors regarding the Arab population,"
she said. "Lieberman's plan has been
adopted by the prime minister," she said.

"The Ara residents are not only Israeli
citizens, they're also indigenous people who dwell on their land, and are not
to be compared with settlers dwelling on another nation's land. We the Arab
citizens aren't part of any such equation and aren't willing to pay the price
again for Israel's policy of occupation and settlements."